[Loser]

Snakeye you are incredible, I love to see the arithmetically capable do their thing. Your formula for facilities is great.

There are a few more things, however, to take into account where Remote Mining is concerned.

1. Cost of the construction vehicle.

2. Cost to get there. (Turns of movement to proposed station location X construction ship maintenance.)

3. Cost while there. (Turns of station construction X construction ship maintenance.)

4. The value of an asteroid decreases over time. (For this reason it may be a good idea to include a self-destruct device on the mining station, so you can get rid of it when it no longer produces more than it costs in maintenance.)

5. Cost afterward. (Continued maintenance of construction ship until it starts doing something useful again (like heading to the next asteroid, when maintenance should be 'billed' to the next station) Remember to account for taking the construction ship back to a Resupply Depot somewhere in your calculations, if you intend to use the ship for a while.)

This is in addition to those elements you have already isolated.

6. Initial cost of mining station.

7. Maintenance of mining station, a function of 6.

8. Mining station's unmodified production, almost a function of 6. (Really a function of the components of the ship, of which 6 is also a function.)

9. Asteroid's starting production modifier.

After all of this, one could put together a separate formula for the maximum viable distance from planet-side shipyard (or Last station) to proposed station site, maximum construction ship cost, maximum station cost, and minimum asteroid value for any given set of the remaining values, for the proposed station to become profitable at all, ever or to be come profitable in a specified number of turns.

If you have the time, patience, and motivation to put all of this into a spreadsheet (with graphs, in all five involved dimensions, with twenty-four color glossy photos with the circles and the arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is for), then you are truly an amazing human begin.

If you just want to lay out the formulae for us, with your usual, readable, reasonable explanation then your just a damn cool guy.

So says me.